Critical Review by Bruce Allen

In [Flaubert's Parrot] this free-form examination of the great French novelist's life and artistic practice, amateur scholarship, cranky partisanship, and a passionate effort at self-understanding are amusingly assembled into a resonant literary comedy.

Barnes's narrator, Geoffrey Brathwaite, is a recently widowed retired doctor. His late wife was herself a kind of English-village Madam Bovary; he's now satisfying his obsessive curiosity about Flaubert, visiting sites associated with the novelist, studying cruxes unresolved by previous scholars: How tall was Flaubert? Who was the aggressor in his vacillating love affair with the poet Louis Colet? What was the significance of the stuffed parrot that inspired his story “A Simple Heart”?